Herding Code: Herding Code 48: Dustin Campbell on Visual Studio 2010

This week on Herding Code, the guys speak with Dustin Campbell about Visual Studio 2010 Beta&rsquo;s &quot;super exciting&quot; programming, debugging and extensibility features and the F# May CTP. &#10;&#10;The show kicks off with Jon commenting about the evolution of Visual Studio. Dustin then ...

Episode synopsis

This week on Herding Code, the guys speak with Dustin Campbell about Visual Studio 2010 Beta’s "super exciting" programming, debugging and extensibility features and the F# May CTP.

The show kicks off with Jon commenting about the evolution of Visual Studio. Dustin then takes us down memory lane sharing how Visual Studio has been torn down and stitched back together over the years - this time with a new WPF-based IDE and an impressive extensibility model.

K Scott notes that F# is now being shipped with Visual Studio 2010 and teases Dustin about working on Project Euler problems in F# with his wife. (There’s a hot dating tip for you.) Dustin squirms a little and then talks in more detail about the latest F# release and the many language refactorings.

Scott K asks if dynamic languages like IronRuby and IronPython are scheduled to be shipped with later versions of Visual Studio and Dustin suggests that those languages may not find benefit in doing so.

Scott K asks if Microsoft is trying to kill off the competition by introducing IDE features already provided by CodeRush and ReSharper? Dustin shares that the new extensibility model within VS2010 actually promotes third-party development and refers to the DevExpresses, JetBrains and Whole Tomatoes of the world as “partners” rather than competition.

Scott K asks if rewriting the VS2010 editor in WPF will elevate WPF’s exposure inside and outside of Microsoft and effectively force the framework to continually improve. Scott K also asks if componentizing Visual Studio (think Perspectives in Eclipse) is something we might see in future bits.

Jon asks about team size and what it takes to build a product like Visual Studio at Microsoft.

Scott K calls out Parallel Programming, a highlighted new feature in VS2010, and Dustin drills into IDE support for parallel programming with parallel debugging windows and profiling views.

Kevin and Dustin talk about improved TDD support with features like "Generate From Usage."

The show wraps up with the guys beating Dustin up a bit with talk about Visual Studio issues such as the Add Reference Dialogue slowness and the "Visual Studio is busy" dialogue.